Produced by Robert Cicconetti, David Wilson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Transcriber's note: | | | | This story was published in _If: Worlds of Science Fiction_, | | July 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence | | that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ Naturally human work was more creative, more inspiring, more important than robot drudgery. Naturally it was the most important task in all the world ... or was it? THE REAL HARD SELL By William W. Stuart Ben Tilman sat down in the easiest of all easy chairs. He picked up a magazine, flipped pages; stood up, snapped fingers; walked to the view wall, walked back; sat down, picked up the magazine. He was waiting, near the end of the day, after hours, in the lush, plush waiting room--"The customer's ease is the Sales Manager's please"--to see the Old Man. He was fidgety, but not about something. About nothing. He was irritated at nobody, at the world; at himself. He was irritated at himself because there was no clear reason for him to be irritated at anything. There he sat, Ben Tilman, normally a cheerful, pleasant young man. He was a salesman like any modern man and a far better salesman than most. He had a sweet little wife, blonde and pretty. He had a fine, husky two-year-old boy, smart, a real future National Sales Manager. He loved them both. He had every reason to be contented with his highly desirable, comfortable lot. And yet he had been getting more sour and edgy ever since about six months after the baby came home from the Center and the novelty of responsibility for wife and child had worn off. He had now quit three jobs, good enough sales jobs where he was doing well, in a year. For no reason? For petty, pointless reasons. With Ancestral Insurance, "Generations of Protection," he'd made the Billion Dollar Club--and immediately begun to feel dissatisfied with it--just before cute, sexy, blonde Betty had suddenly come from nowhere into his life and he had married her. That had helped, sure. But as soon after that as he had started paying serious attention to his job again, he was fed up with it. "Too much paper work. All those forms. It's work for a robot, not a man," he'd told Betty when he quit. A lie. The paper work was, as he looked back on it, not bad at all; pleasant even, in a way. It was just--nothing. Anything.